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Nick Fitzgerald is the CEO of TV2U, a managed OTT TV provider that works with mobile operators and ISPs to remove the traditional barriers to entry around launching a streaming service. Prior to founding TV2U, Nick was VP Asia at Digital Rapids and has over 25 years’ experience in the media and entertainment space, working with companies all around the world to take advantage of the OTT opportunity.

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OTT video may have changed the advertising game, but it’s advances in content protection efforts that have caused the latest evolution in consumer targeting. Underpinned by data analytics, streaming services are now in a position to offer the deeper insights to their advertising partners that’ll turn content fans into platform loyalists, writes Nick Fitzgerald, CEO, TV2U

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There’s no question that the way advertisers reach audiences has irreversibly changed when it comes to video. The rise of OTT and explosion of popularity for watching content anywhere, at any time, and on any device, has made it easier to get a brand’s message in front of consumers than ever before. Yet the degree of targeting currently on offer isn’t as accurate as it could be.

Brands and their advertising partners often still rely on traditional methods to plan and execute their campaigns when it comes to OTT video. This means trusting just a handful of data points in order to identify whether a streaming service subscriber is the right fit for what they’re trying to achieve.

Fortunately, things are now changing with the rise of next-generation OTT TV, which delivers a significant leap forward when it comes to cross-device user insights. Before we can identify how this has impacted ad targeting, though, we need to consider how streaming video got here. And this particular story has an unexpected hero – advances in content protection.

How tackling piracy has changed the OTT advertising game

Piracy has always been a thorn in the media industry’s side. Since the dawn of video there have been consumers who want to watch the latest content without paying for it. This became much worse with the advent of OTT as it opened up more routes for unauthorized content access over the internet. In fact, it’s now reached the point where Ovum has predicted that spend on TV and video anti-piracy services will top $1 billion before the end of 2018.

A key line of defense available to OTT streaming service providers has been the use of end-to-end content delivery platforms. This method of getting video in front of consumers is incredibly useful for helping to address the issue at hand, as it offers full visibility into how each consumer is engaging with the platform. End-to-end content delivery is now fairly commonplace, but unfortunately, it hasn’t been enough to make content pirates cease and desist altogether.

As unscrupulous individuals continue to find new ways of circumventing the technology being used to prevent them from accessing content without paying for it, tackling this head on has become more about prevention than finding the cure. The reality is that no technology is 100% infallible, which has led to the bolstering of OTT defenses in a new way. Now, more innovative end-to-end delivery platforms are being built upon a layer of advanced data analytics.

As you’d expect, this has had a huge role to play in identifying and cutting off unauthorized access to a streaming service as it takes place. But it’s also being applied to the inflection point between content protection efforts and more targeted user insights. And this is where things get interesting from an advertising perspective.

Better insights, better advertising

Advanced data analytics at the platform level has introduced a fundamental shift in how OTT video services are able to track and manage viewer access, and in turn it’s cracked open the future of targeted engagement. Having data analytics baked into a streaming service makes it possible for advertisers to target based on truly individual user profiles rather than broad demographics data or viewers of specific genres, and to reach different audience segments watching the same content.

Underpinned by the end-to-end delivery nature of modern streaming services, data analytics also makes it possible to know who’s watching and engaging with an ad. This has kick-started the age of hyper-personalization in OTT, giving advertisers the ability to reach the right person, with the right ad, no matter who’s watching the content in question – even if several consumers in a household are watching the same content but on different devices.

Turning content fans into platform loyalists

Granularity like this is important for marketers too. After all, data analytics used in this way creates a much greater degree of relevancy for the consumer, which has a host of benefits. For example, by being able to identify how subscribers are engaging with the service, marketers can identify whether they’re likely to churn.

Combined with other insights from across the network or the user’s habits, this creates enough ammunition to take pre-emptive steps to address the situation. Evidently, the use of data analytics in this way has huge value for bolstering the bottom line, but it also represents the level of user insight necessary to turn content fans into platform loyalists.

Once you’ve got access to richer viewer data, supplemented by other insights provided by the consumer themselves at sign-up, and their preferences that come to light after using the service for a while, this creates an asset that’s of huge value for managing the user experience.

By turning behavioral habits into patterns, patterns into data insights, and insights into intelligence that can inform action to keep users engaged and subscribed, it helps to convert short-term viewers that signed up to watch a certain piece of content into long-term subscribers. And, of course, being able to identify a platform advocate instead of merely a content fan is much more useful from an advertising perspective since it creates a deeper pool of valuable data upon which to target them.

From consumer habits to actionable insights

Ultimately, it’s only by knowing more about the consumer that it becomes easier to create an engaging experience that’s tailored to their needs. This is inherently important for advertising as research shows that consumers are much more receptive to highly targeted promotions. But it’s also the key to putting the ‘personal’ in ‘personalisation’ in a way that goes far beyond a standard content recommendation algorithm.